


Iron Roots, Gold Leaf

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (of a fairytale variety not a violent one), Abuse, Big Bang Challenge, Child Abuse, Comic Book Science, Fire, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, IMBB, M/M, Robots, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Violence, Weapons, fairytale tone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 22:53:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Tony Stark loved plants. He wasn’t sure if he loved them for any particular reason, or if it was love out of self-defense, the way he sometimes suspected his mother loved his father. He also loved robots, spaceships, and AIs, but those were forbidden.Howard Stark was a mean, paranoid bastard, and he was convinced that Tony was a threat to him. At least, that was what he pieced together over the first several years of his imprisonment in the greenhouse. Howard would prefer Tony study less important sciences, like botany, rather than engineering and physics, where he might one day compete with Howard himself intellectually. More importantly, his young son was proving to be too great a distraction, and he wanted Tony locked away and out of his sight.When Tony first met Rhodey, he was fifteen and trying to break into an MIT science building with a remotely controlled robot shaped like a vine.





	1. Chapter 1

Tony Stark loved plants. He wasn’t sure if he loved them for any particular reason, or if it was love out of self-defense, the way he sometimes suspected his mother loved his father. He also loved robots, spaceships, and AIs, but those were forbidden.

Howard Stark was a mean, paranoid bastard, and he was convinced that Tony was a threat to him. At least, that was what he pieced together over the first several years of his imprisonment in the greenhouse. Howard would prefer Tony study less important sciences, like botany, rather than engineering and physics, where he might one day compete with Howard himself intellectually. More importantly, his young son was proving to be too great a distraction, and he wanted Tony locked away and out of his sight.

The greenhouse was a prison sentence from his father disguised as a birthday gift. As prisons went, it really wasn’t that bad. It was warm and bright, and his father never stepped foot inside because the vines and roots that tangled and twisted up in each other like braided strands of different people’s hair always caught on his alcohol-clumsy feet and broke his suave, powerful-businessman stride. Completely unacceptable. He always sent his mother to fetch him instead, and only if absolutely necessary. And the plants, he soon realized, were just as ripe with the possibility of discovery as metal and code had been before they’d been confiscated. They satisfied his thirst for scientific exploration. 

Sometimes he missed engineering with an icy ache, as though a part of his heart had shriveled up like the brown, cracking leaf of a dried-out plant. Sooner or later, his mother assured him, it would go away and he could cultivate something else in its former place in his heart. When he told her that what he really wanted was to water it until it was healthy again, she looked nervously in the direction of his father’s workshop. 

And so it was that one day, when he was ten and had become comfortable in the seclusion of his greenhouse, he snuck a computer out of his father’s lap while he was on a business trip. He hid it in the darkest room, the one towards the back where he kept the plants that glowed in the dark and looked like fairies if you stood far enough away. Never once had either of his parents ventured back here, where the floor was wet even when he’d last watered ages ago and broad leaves of imported jungle plants grew together up near the ceiling like interlocking pieces of scale metal armor against the sun. 

Sweat trickled down his forehead and along the side of his nose, barely missing his eyes to slip down by his lips. It was hot and the computer was heavy, but that wasn’t what set his heart skipping in his chest. 

_ Stark men are made of Iron _ , he thought darkly. The words screeched through his mind like claws on metal.  _ You can’t trust anyone. _ Well, this just went to prove his father right. He  _ couldn’t _ trust anyone, not even his own son. 

The glow of the computer screen was different from the glow of the bioluminescent plants. It lit the room in erie blues and whites that only touched the surface of the closest part of the plant, allowing the rest to remain hidden from human eyes. He smiled at the thought that the plants could hide in their own shadows. He wished he could do that. 

The theft was discovered quickly, but Tony was never caught. No one ever came looking in his greenhouse prison. The computer was a treasure, and he hid it carefully, deep in the greenhouse where no one would ever stumble upon it. 

It wasn’t the only thing he stole from his father, not by a long shot. But it was the theft that allowed him to create his own miniature world within the greenhouse. 

* * *

Tony reached out to the world through the internet, where he quickly learned that he could be whoever he wanted to be and that no greenhouse could confine him. More importantly, he learned that engineering, space, physics and all the other fields from which he had been barred were waiting for him, and were just as delighted to share their secrets with him now as they had been before his imprisonment.

He burned through online college courses and databases and research papers, tried his hand at coding and befriended scientists under a false name. He treasured his pre-imprisonment knowledge, and had enshrined it in all the prime storage spaces in his brain, casting out names and birthdays and old conversations to make room, but the world had progressed while he was away and there was so much to catch up on. 

Once reunited with his old loves, he took a peek at the world of botany. Here too he found himself surrounded by new ideas and theories and debates, and he lapped up this knowledge just as eagerly as he had the advances in physics and computer science. But there were also curious gaps in what he could find. Things he’d known for years seemed undiscovered. 

Slowly, he began to do more than just read. He found message boards, blogs, communities, anywhere with fellow scientists he could talk to. 

One such scientist was named Jane Foster. She was an astrophysicist, and therefore the perfect person to answer his questions about what the field of physics had been up to while he’d been gone. He didn’t tell her his age, or any incriminating details, but through their stared love of physics a friendship slowly formed. Jane gave him the sun, moon, and stars, and in return he started to design a robot for her. If she was going to give him such wonderful things, it was only right that he should give her something in return. 

And thus Dum-E, his first robot, was born. He took a long time for Tony to build, since he had to break into Howard’s workshop to get the materials, and every time he was caught leaving the greenhouse, let alone anywhere near the lab, his father worked himself into a destructive fury. But in the end he wound up with a relatively lightweight, solar powered metal arm that walked around with the help of a system of synthetic roots. When the roots retracted, they revealed a propulsion mechanism that would allow the robot to launch into space. 

The night he programmed Dum-E with the coordinates to Jane’s lab and taped a note to him explaining his functions to Jane was one of the most confusing in his life. His chest felt light, like he did when he’d made a new discovery or managed to make progress in a difficult project, but tears kept leaking from his eyes and making his vision go all blurry. When Dum-E flew off into the night, bound for a happier lab that wasn’t haunted by the specter of Howard’s interference, he almost called out for him to come back to him. 

He refrained. He might be a prisoner here, but his wonderful little robot didn’t have to be. 

The second such scientist was a woman named Maya Hansen. She wasn’t as friendly as Jane, but she was more than willing to share her research with Tony if he helped her move it forward. And since she was working with plants, he could always move it forward. 

It was through his collaborations with Maya that Tony began to make his plant robots in earnest. He was probably more intimately familiar with the internal physics, chemistry and structure of his plants than anyone else alive, but Dum-E had been his first foray into really working to twist those systems to his own purposes. As he and Maya sent emails hurling back and forth, full of ideas about energy and viruses and cell structure, he began to experiment with solar power. Every day he worked tirelessly to bring the efficiency up, then up again, then up some more until it could match that of a plant. By the time he sent Dum-E off to Jane, he had perfected the delicate structural balance needed to make a truly efficient solar energy source. 

The line between botany and engineering blurred as he experimented until it was more of a smudge than anything. He created plants that could power a laptop, robots that could fool a passerby into thinking they were just an innocuous plant, and everything in between. Each new experiment transmogrified botany into engineering and engineering into botany, connecting one to the other until they were inseparable. His exploration of energy production and photosynthesis lead to creating solar cells, which in turn lead him to create robot plants that grew organically, rather than requiring assembly, which could plug into a device and charge it. This in turn lead him to investigate the chemical processes involved, which lead to the chemical signaling between plants, which lead to communicator plants… and so it went. 

Had he been a more normal child, or at the very least been given the freedom to leave the greenhouse, he would have been interrupted in his tireless investigation and collaboration by some high society event, school, publicity stunts, and his father’s rage. But that was not the case, and so as long as he was in the greenhouse, none of those things ever came to draw him away from his chosen task. 

He easily convinced Maya that he was a professional working on projects of relevance to her work, but he needn’t have put quite so much thought and effort into doing so. Even if she had suspected something was off, he was too beneficial to her research for her to ask uncomfortable questions. 

Before long he had hundreds of plant robots, most of them as small and easily hidden as baby ferns or young sprouts soon to be replanted. He also had a version of her project-which she called Extremis- and plans to use it in his robots. He thought he could integrate it so that the limbs that got pinched or snapped grew back. 

(This didn’t really work out, and he eventually put Extremis on the shelf.)

The third scientist he met was a man named Ho Yinsen. 

Ho Yinsen seemed, for reasons unknown to Tony, to care about where he was going with his life. Sometimes his questions hit too close to home, and that was why Tony didn’t continue his relationship with him for very long. Every time he was asked about his family, about the things he did for fun, about friends and places and schools, he was intensely aware that he couldn’t answer the question. Most of the other people he talked to on the internet accepted his avoidance, or never asked the questions in the first place. 

Yinsen’s questions echoed in his head sometimes, when he got to wondering about the world beyond Stark Mansion. 

And so it was Ho Yinsen who inspired him to make his first long-range, video-capable robot and send it out into the world under cover of darkness. And therefore it was Ho Yinsen whom he had to thank for meeting Rhodey. 

* * *

James Rhodes dreamed that his dorm room had been filled with strange, science-fiction alien-planet looking plants. Weird, moving vines coiled and climbed the walls like snakes and grew trumpet-like golden flowers.

It was an odd sort of dream for him to have. For one thing, it was perfectly calm. In his dreams, he was usually doing something; running from something, looking for something, fighting something, anything but lying down in bed and watching pretty flowers sprout, bud and bloom like in a time-lapse video. For another, he could feel the bed beneath him. Background sensory details like that were rarely so clear.

One of them grew a trailing vine that cascaded down and came to rest on his pillow. He poked it, and found that it was much harder than he would have suspected. He poked it again, then gave it a light squeeze. It almost felt like a wire. Like it was a robot plant or something. 

Then his alarm went off. 

The plants jerked robotically in response. The flowers rotated wildly, like they were trying to pinpoint the noise. After a few seconds, each and every flower was pointed at his alarm clock, stock-still. 

He stared at them, then his alarm clock, uncomprehending for a second, then leaped out of bed. This was no dream. His room was being invaded by robot plants!

Shit shit shit. The snaking vines were everywhere. He had to dance and twist to keep from stepping on one as he dashed for the door. What if his feet touched the vines and they wrapped around his feet like ropes? What if they burst and left slime all over the place? They were magical dream vines capable of moving by themselves, anything was possible!

He grabbed for the door handle, only to jerk his hand back like it was sizzling hot. A tiny vine tendril, about half the thickness of his pinkie finger, was wrapped around it like a tiny ribbon. When he looked closer, it seemed to be moving like the larger vines, slowly wrapping more and more loops around the handle. 

Oh no. If this thing was trying to open the door, he had to stop it. Plants opening doors was firmly in weird-science-fiction land, and weird science fiction didn’t belong in his dorm room. 

He glanced around wildly, looking for something to use against the plant, when he noticed the window. 

It was partially open, the way he left it on the warm but not stiflingly warm mid-September nights when he wanted a light breeze but had already packed his fan away in the back of his closet. The vines seemed to be inching through the window, like little burglars. That was how they were getting in. 

He hustled over and tried to pull the window shut. Maybe if he could stop any more of the buggers from getting in- crap. The latch was covered in waving, tightening tendrils, holding it firmly in the stuck position. He wasn’t going to be able to move that window without some serious leverage. 

One of the vines brushed against his bare foot. 

He shrieked and leaped up onto the edge of his desk. Shit, it sure felt real, which sucked. He’d really like this to be some strange, unusually-detailed dream. 

With one hand on a vine-free space of window frame and both knees braced against the edge of the desk, he pulled his torso far enough to the right to stick his head out the window. A quick scan of the lawn outside told him that no one was up and about yet. Of course not. It was a Saturday. The only reason  _ he _ was up this early was because he had that essay to write for his mechanical engineering class, and if he let himself sleep in he’d end up feeling too groggy to focus on it. 

Maybe he could escape out the window? He was only on the second floor, after all. He tried to do some quick mental math to see if he would fall with enough force to break anything important, but was distracted by a flower nearly brushing his hand as its vine slid down the edge of the window frame. 

The vines appeared to grow up the sides of the dorm building’s walls. They fanned out a bit, each one exploring their own little patches of weathered brick, but upon closer look they all appeared to be growing out from the same point. He leaned out a little further, straining his neck a bit, and peered past the eye-catching vines and flowers. 

There, on the ground, was brownish ball of something. 

As he watched, it shifted from side to side a bit. It never moving from it’s spot under his window, but it was definitely mobile. 

“Just what I want to see on my Saturday morning, a root ball that can walk,” he muttered.

“Well, how else did you expect it to get around?” A voice from behind him asked.

He shrieked and toppled sideways off the desk. His knee collided painfully with the floor, but his upper half was cushioned by a tentacle the width of a python that reached out whip-fast and wrapped around his torso. He hung suspended for a moment, knee smarting and chest trying to expand enough against the vine to properly hyperventilate. Then he started twisting and struggling for dear life. 

“Hey, hey, wait a second, let me put you down first!” The voice said. Hearing it for a second time, he realized that it sounded like it was speaking through a microphone or something. A good microphone, to be fair, but whoever was speaking certainly wasn’t in the room with him. Come to think of it, it kind of sounded like a teenage boy whose voice hadn’t finished dropping yet.

“ _ Are _ you going to put me down?” He demanded. 

“Of course,” the voice replied. Offense dripped like dew from each syllable. 

“Don’t sound so offended, Disembodied Voice, a vine just move faster than I can and wrapped me up in its coils like a snake. My bedroom has been invaded and plants are  _ moving.  _ I can’t think I can take anything for granted right now.”

“Plants are always moving,” the Disembodied Voice replied. “You just normally can’t see it because they’re not moving fast enough for you.”

The vine slowly lowered him to the floor, where it deposited him in an undignified heap. 

“And is this a bedroom? Sorry, that was my mistake. I was trying to get into one of the science buildings. Must have mistaken your dorm for a different place. I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on. Who are you, and why are you trying to invade the MIT science buildings?”

“Invading is such a hostile word, don’t you think? I’m not doing anything nefarious, I’m just poking around.”

“Oh, I think invading is exactly the right word.” He picked himself up off the ground and gestured at the vines that covered his entire dorm on the off-chance that Disembodied Voice could hear him. “This certainly looks like an invasion to me. And you didn’t answer either of my questions.”

One of the vines lifted itself up off the floor in a sort of classic cobra S-shape. One of the flowers on it rotated so that the center of the petals faced him, revealing a tiny speaker nested inside. 

“Hmm, I guess I didn’t. My name is Tony, and I was curious.”

“So you’re not an up and coming super villain intent on stealing some key, groundbreaking research so you can go on a mad scientist rampage across some Eastern Seaboard city?” he asked dubiously. He flicked the flower with one finger. It bobbed lightly, like a real flower would, before returning to the exact same position as before.

“Cross my heart, no plans for super villainy. I just really wanted to sneak a peek.”

“A peek at what?” he demanded. 

The Disembodied Voice paused. 

“I’m not entirely sure yet, but this is supposed to be a big science place, right? Well, I’ve read a bunch of scientific papers from people that work here or went here, anyways, and people on the internet say it’s a good college. This is my first time checking the place out myself, so I don’t know where the good stuff is, but I’m sure it’s there.”

He reached out and tentatively tapped one of the flowers with his finger as the Disembodied Voice spoke. The petals felt soft like they should, but they only gave so much under his fingertip. If he kept pressing, it would not keep bending. 

“So, to sum up. You’ve been living under a rock somewhere, heard about MIT on the internet and decided to break in with a… vine robot? whatever this thing is, so that you could find out what sort of research was going on, but you messed up and invaded my bedroom instead of the biology building next door?”

“Oh,  _ that’s _ the biology building? Okay, I guess that sort of makes sense. I just didn’t go far enough. My mistake, sorry about that.”

James looked at the flower cradled in his hand. Part of him wanted to try and crush it in his fist, toss as many vines as possible out the window, then grab his phone and call campus police, local police, his mom, and then look up the contact info for every botany teacher on campus and call them too. Another part of him, however, wanted to know more about the crazy teenager who apparently lived under a rock and grew plant robots for the purposes of breaking and entering. 

“What’s your name, kid?” he said. 

“Tony,” the Disembodied Voice replied. “What’s yours?”

“James Rhodes.”

“Rhodes, I like that. It almost sounds like Rhodey, and I love rhodeys. They’re kind of hard to grow in the beginning, but once you get them going they’re wonderful. It took forever to get one to accept an electrochemical signal adaptor, but I felt so triumphant when I finally managed it. So, Rhodey, you don’t happen to be doing any scientific research at the moment, do you?”

“No. In fact, I was supposed to be using this time to bang out a draft of a paper for Mechanical Engineering, but I guess I’m going to have to spend this time holding a diplomatic meeting with a shameless invader.”

The Disembodied Voice-  _ Tony- _ laughed. “Hey, I said I was sorry! I honestly didn’t mean to break into your dorm. What’s your paper about?”

“We’re supposed to pick a theoretical physics topic that’s related to airplanes or other aircraft somehow and discuss what allowances and modifications and whatnot are needed when applying that theory to the real word. It’s real dry stuff.” Now that he was thinking about the assignment, he almost wasn’t upset about being woken up by plant robots. 

“Oh, really?” Tony asked. “That sounds so cool! What sort of airplane are you thinking of doing yours on?”

“I haven’t decided yet. I was going to try and bang out a draft this morning so I wouldn’t end up leaving it until Sunday night, but you know. You happened.”

One of the vines twisted and writhed in place like wringing hands. Just how was Tony controlling these vines, anyway? Was he making them do that to project a certain image for James’ benefit, or was he doing it unconsciously? Either way, it looked pretty strange on a plant. 

“Would it be a problem if I helped you? Worked with you? Took a peek at your draft?” Tony asked in a wheedling voice. 

James considered. 

“If I let you help hang out here in my dorm while I write this thing, will you refrain from breaking and entering anywhere else so I don’t have to call Campus Security and tell them there’s a little teenager somewhere trying to use his robot vine thing to pull off a one-man heist movie?” 

The leaves surrounding the flower facing him rose and fell like a shrug. 

“Sure. You might want to open your window a little more, though, so I can get the root ball through.”

* * *

Once he was no longer scaring James out of his skin, Tony was a good partner, if perhaps a bit blasé about committing crimes.

“It’s not like I’m hurting anyone by taking a look at their science building,” one of the flowers whined when James commented on it. 

“You still shouldn’t break into places you don’t have permission to be,” he said. 

“Why not? I’m not going to do anything bad.”

James rubbed his eyes and collapsed backwards onto his bed. Rough drafts were the worst. Even if you had all the information in your head  _ and _ knew exactly where you wanted to go with it, it was still hard to get it all put together in a nice and cohesive way. 

“Think about it this way, Tony. Imagine if someone broke into whatever crazy computer room I’m imagining you in. You didn’t invite them or want them, but they’re barging in anyway.”

“I wish more people would do that. Not my dad, he’d just do it because he was angry at me and wanted to punish me for something, but other scientists would be great. Hey, since I broke into your room, wanna come break into mine?”

Jesus, this kid was  _ not _ old enough to be here on campus. Unless he was purposefully acting older than his age. ‘Come break into mine,’  _ ha. _

“Just don’t break break into the science buildings, Tony. And unless you’re within two hours walk of my dorm or twenty bus stops from campus, the answer is no. I’m a college student, I’m busy. Besides, aren’t you a little young to be inviting people into your room?”

“Hey, I’m not much younger than you! If you’re a freshman, then you’ve only got a couple of years on me! So you can quit it with the ‘kid’ stuff any time you want.”

“Come on, what are you, thirteen?”

“Fifteen.” One of the flowers projected a gif of a teenager sticking their tongue out at the camera.

“Oh yeah, fifteen. Real mature age, that is.” It is, however, much closer to James’ own age then he would have guessed. “Hey, so these flower things you’ve got here can play PA system and project images, huh? What else can they do?”

Tony launched into an excited, rambling explanation that was pretty interesting. Much more interesting than his physics paper, anyway. His ideas were just so off-the-wall. Before he knew it, the sun was high in the sky and Tony had made himself at home in his life.

* * *

Tony called his vine robot home from it’s maiden mission and then did a little victory dance. He hadn’t managed to break into the science buildings, but he’d made a science friend instead! They hadn’t been very successful at staying focused on Rhodey’s paper, but by the end of the day he had a fully-formed draft so what did it really matter if they went on a couple of tangents?

His chest felt as warm and full of life as the greenhouse for the first time in years. Rhodey was interested in his projects! He had thoughts on robot and AI ethics! He understood the importance of interdisciplinary work! He wanted to listen to Tony talk about botany! He didn’t think it was a lesser science!

Tony raised his arms and danced around the room, laughing. There was a glowing ball of happiness in his chest, and it felt like if he could just hold on to that feeling it could sustain him forever. Several of his modified plants bobbed and shook on their stems, joining him in his dance. 

He _ had _ to go back and talk with him again. 

Well, send another robot. He couldn’t actually go anywhere until he was ready to make an escape. He could get a plant off the property unnoticed, but if he tried to leave Howard’s cameras would catch him. He was pretty sure he could hack them, but that would only work once, and he didn’t want to draw his parent’s attention to himself before he made his escape. 

Not even thoughts of Howard could drag him down today, though. He had his first real, human friend, and he was amazing. He hadn’t felt this good since he successfully made his first plant robot.

_ Tony’s first robot wasn’t at all like the robots gaining acclaim in the world of robotics, but he didn’t know that yet. He hadn’t built the it because he wanted to make a laudable scientific advance or because he had always wanted to build something out of a sci-fi novel. He built it because he wanted to communicate.  _

_ It hummed under his fingers with electricity and chemicals and all sorts of things that he’d always thought of as existing in a lab somewhere, isolated into their component, useful parts to be used by some scientist like his father, but his father would never have made something like this. This was different. This was in context. If he closed his eyes, he could see the electrochemical signaling network that spanned the raised bed in front of him. It was full of draping, twisting vine plants and bobbing, multicolored flowers, and their many shapes and colors and smells were nearly strong enough to distract his senses.  _

_ Bacteria in the roots like so may flashing fish in a coral reef, fungi spreading down beneath the ground like a brand-new miniature subway system, minute chemicals traveling up and down the roots and stems and into the leaves- that was what he needed to focus on. The lovely colors were merely flashy advertisements. He wanted something with a bit more substance. Less than a year ago, he had been content with just seeing it. Until recently he’d been content with rough replications.  _

_ Today, he replicated a little more than just the process.  _

_ He carefully wrapped the control pad he’d made around his palm, then plugged it into the computer. Slowly, the crackle of electricity spiked in his palm. It wasn’t painful, but it felt like all the areas in his brain that jumped when he was in pain were jumping at this sensation too. On the computer screen, figures started to fly by like leaping frogs. He’d look over the data at his leisure later. For now, his focus was centered on a small screen in the top right hand corner, which displayed the basic types of signals he was getting from his plant robot. Under the input section was an output section. It was pretty simple- a few basic buttons he could push and a command typing area for the bits that weren’t automatic-but that was okay. This was only mock one.  _

Tony wanted to hold the memory of this day and preserve it digitally so if he ever forgot, he could always recover it. He wanted to make a million copies of it and store one in each leaf of each of his robots. He wanted to see Rhodey again. 

* * *

It wasn’t long after Tony’s first successful foray into long-range robot piloting that he received a rare visit from Obie.

Howard didn’t like when Tony talked to other people, especially other adults, but Obie’s position as Howard’s business partner made him special. He could get away with coming to see Tony every now and again, especially once Tony had stopped trying to act out and earn his father’s attention. 

It was sometimes hard to talk to Obie- he didn’t really care about plants, and he was more of a businessman than a scientist, so there weren’t many topics of conversation open to them- but some dark, wounded part of Tony always lit up during these unpredictable appearances. Sure, Obie couldn’t come very often. Tony understood that. But he did come when he could, and that was more than his father ever did. And when he came, he didn’t wince at the dirtiness and humidity of the greenhouse the way his mother did. 

When Obie came, he told Tony how smart he was, and what a great asset he’d be to the company once he got older. 

Tony’s knowledge of “the company” was a little shaky. He knew they invented weapons, and that his dad spent long hours in his workshop or talking with other scientists at conferences and at a place called SI Headquarters, and that this was what drew him away from the Mansion long enough for Tony to sneak down and pilfer materials when he was younger and hadn’t established a method of obtaining the materials for himself over the internet. 

He wasn’t quite sure what Obie’s role was, given that he wasn’t a scientist and had certainly never invented anything, but whatever it was it put him nearly on equal footing with Howard. 

When Obie arrived at the greenhouse, Tony was working on drawing out a schematic plan on a piece of lined notebook paper. He wanted to build a flower whose petals could detach and hover individually. He was pretty sure he could make it happen, but he needed to figure out how to get the recall to function properly. Otherwise his robot would just be leaving robot petals behind like bread crumbs. 

As soon as he heard Obie’s thundering “Tony! How are you doing my boy?” echo through the greenhouse, however, he snapped the notebook closed and went running to see him. 

“Obie!” he called. He threw himself into the strong, all-enveloping hug that Obie always gave him when he visited. It was one of his favorite things about Obie’s visits; Obie was the only one who ever offered him that sort of physical affection. 

“Tony, how have you been? You’ve gotten taller since I last say you,” Obie rumbled. Pressed up against him like this, Tony could feel the words vibrating through his whole body. His skin sang where it touched Obie’s. It wasn’t often that he got to touch other people, isolated as he was. 

“I’ve kept busy!” He said. Obie always liked to hear that he’d been working on things. He didn’t get mad about Tony being smart the way Howard was wont to do. 

“Good to hear, good to hear! What have you been working on?”

Tony pulled back and thrust out his notebook. 

“Here, look! I’ve still got some kinks to smooth out, but I should have it soon. See how it comes apart from the outside in?”

Obie’s eyes roved excitedly over the page. 

“This is something, alright. Do these bits here move independently?”

“They can, but only if you program them to. Otherwise they move in a swirl pattern, following the orientation around the center.” Tony grinned. “And then they fly off in whatever direction they’re supposed to go in, and then-”

“Have you showed this to your father?” Obie asked.

Tony could feel his smile dimming, but he couldn’t help it. 

“No. He doesn’t come up here much.”

“Well, he’s a busy man. Always working. But tell you what, why don’t we go show him this together? I bet he could think of a dozen applications for this over at SI.”

* * *

Showing the designs to Howard didn’t go well, per se, but it didn’t go as badly as it could have gone. He was not impressed, but he didn’t yell either. He got close, when Tony brought up the robots the design was originally meant for, and when he said that the independent parts were supposed to be flower petals he was convinced he was going to get the sting of an open palm against his face, but Obie’s presence seemed to keep him somewhat restrained.

In the end, though, he got locked out of the discussion. Howard had some grand idea about how to incorporate the design into a bomb deployer, and Obie thought that’s just great. 

Obie told him kindly afterwards that Howard thought robots were a waste of time, and that he was disappointed that Tony was basing his designs on flower petals of all things, but that he really did appreciate the design, and that Tony should be proud of that. 

Tony wondered what was so wrong about drawing inspiration from one of nature’s most successful designs.

* * *

“Why don’t you just leave?” Rhodey asked one day after Tony got to talking about how disappointing the whole episode had been, and why he was stupid for being disappointed.

“What?”

Rhodey shrugged. “I mean, you have the ability to make sick robots, Tony. Most scientists can’t do that. That’s gotta be a marketable skill. Besides, it doesn’t sound like anyone’s really taking care of you. Fifteen’s old enough to pass for sixteen, and people will believe an independent sixteen year old if you really sell it. So why don’t you just go?”

He ran a band over his face, then gave the camera a raw, sad look. 

“Tony, your home sounds awful. Like, I don’t even know how to explain how messed up it is that your father exiled you to a greenhouse because he was jealous. And I know you like this Obie character, and he sure seems like the only one who’s on the right track, but honestly man, who wouldn’t be interested in your robots? And you said he took your design to use at your father’s company, right?”

Tony nodded.

“Well, that sure sounds like stealing to me. He just took your design and gave it to your dad, who sounds like he’s going to take it and make a bunch of money off of it. And all the while he’s gonna keep making you live in the greenhouse. That’s messed up, man.”

It was like fireworks going off in Tony’s head. 

It had never occurred to him that he could leave. Sure, he’d left the greenhouse to swipe stuff from Howard’s lab, or to sneak a chat with Jarvis, but he’d never considered running away. It wasn’t that he thought he couldn’t- in fact, now that he thought about it, it would probably be easy, given that no one really had regular contact with him. It was just that the idea had honestly never occurred to him. 

“Rhodey-bear, I think you’re onto something.”


	2. Chapter 2

One of the perks of a robot workforce, Tony discovered, was that they could work more or less around the clock. 

From his makeshift lab in the greenhouse he commanded an army of ivy robots that twisted and climbed and clung with ferocious stubbornness, of tree robots whose roots pulled them along the ground the way he always imagined the Ents from the Lord of the Rings moved and whose branches stretched in every direction touched by the sun, of levitating mosses that could gently carry smaller, more delicate materials in their soft grasp, and many other creations. 

He planned to build a tower like the ones in the fairytales his mother used to read to him before Howard declared him ‘too old for that nonsense,’ the ones where princesses lived and people had to fight long and hard to reach them. That sounded just about perfect to him. 

There was a learning curve, to be sure. Some robots were stronger or more dexterous than others, and he occasionally forgot which robot he was giving orders to at any given moment. At first, it was just little things. A robot dropping a screw he thought they could hold, accidentally picking one of the slower moving ones, that sort of thing. It was never a big enough problem to warrant stopping, so he just filed the incidents away as something to compensate for in later models. 

Then, after the first foundation of the Tower had just been completed, he hurt one of his bots. 

The willow tree robot in question couldn’t actually feel pain, of course, but Tony’s insides felt like they were on fire anyway. He’d  _ promised _ never to hurt his bots, he’d  _ told them _ he’d never hurt them, and yet here he was, looking through the camera monitor at four beautiful, solar-powered branches lying broken on the ground. They twitched every once in a while, excess electricity and independent parts still trying to complete the task he’d given them. Loose wires lay like broken bones against the trampled grass. 

He’d forgotten that the willow tree robot was more dexterous and less strong than the other tree robots. Her purpose had been more delicate work that required multiple branches working together. Among the broken branches lay the scattered wooden beams he’d ordered her to lift.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he cooed as he typed the command to halt. “I didn’t mean to get you hurt. I’d never hurt you on purpose.”

_ I’m not like Howard, _ he wanted to say, but that felt like a lie. Howard hurt Tony, and now Tony had hurt his robot. He’d asked it to do something he’d never designed it to do, and it had tried for him, and now it’s limbs were twitching on the ground. Tears gathered in his eyes as he furiously typed up meaningless apologies. They weren’t commands, and his bots weren’t intelligent. They just followed the commands he gave them. His apologies weren’t a command, so they would be ignored. 

_ Good, _ he thought. They should be ignored. So he was sorry. His bot was still broken. 

Come on, Stark men are made of iron! He couldn’t cry, not now, not ever. Crying made him weak, it made him-

The surface tension broke, and tears waterfalled over his eyelashes and down his cheeks. The Tiny Apology Flood.

He needed to fix this, but he couldn’t leave the greenhouse. Not yet, at least. Not until he was ready to leave for good. But what was he supposed to do? The wore work on all of his bots was extremely complex and precise. None of the unbroken bots could do it remotely, even if he’d written the appropriate commands. And it wasn’t just the wiring- it was the chemical reactions, the electrical fields, all the things he’d done to mimic the actual anatomy of a plant. A little duct tape wouldn’t fix this. 

His heart beat like a hummingbird’s, so loudly he could hear it pounding in his own ears. What was he supposed to  _ do? _

What would Rhodey say? Would he still want to be friends, if he knew Tony was the awful sort of person who asked things of his robots that he knew they couldn’t do? Would he still think Tony was smart if he knew he’d broken an innocent robot?

His face felt like it was one giant ember, glowing with shame and misery. His tears should have evaporated the instant they touched his red cheeks. 

Maybe he should call Rhodey, tell him what happened. Once Rhodey knew how bad he’d messed up, he wouldn’t want to be friends anymore, and Tony didn’t deserve friends. Not a horrible screw-up like him. Yeah, he should call Rhodey so Rhodey would stop being his friend. That was an appropriate punishment for his sins. 

His eyes stung horribly when he wiped them. He welcomed the sensation. It worked out nicely when his own body punished him. Nice and efficient. 

It took some fumbling, what with how blurry the tears had left his vision, but he eventually found the microphone set that matched the vine robot he’d hidden under Rhodey’s bed. It was late afternoon, so classes should be finished for the day. There was a good chance Rhodey would be in his dorm, being a productive member of society who didn’t ruin everything he touched. 

He had to type to command to unfurl and move out from underneath the bed three times before he managed to get it right. His fingers trembled like an old man’s as he typed. 

The screen in front of him lit up as the microphones, cameras and light sensors engaged. A video feed popped up, showing Rhodey smiling and sitting at his desk, pouring over a heavy looking book. 

“Hey, Tones, what’s up? I thought you had some huge, mysterious project that was going to take up all your time? Don’t tell me you finished already!”

His friend’s bright, pleased tone unleashed another round of heart pounding and shame. 

“I hurt one of my bots,” he said. His voice only wavered a little, and didn’t break until the very end, which was better than he’d thought he could manage. Once transmitted through the microphone, you probably wouldn’t be able to pick up on the waver at all. 

“What? What happened?”

“I forgot which one I was driving, and I had it pick up something heavier than it could lift. The branches snapped right off.”

Little sobs and hitches tried valiantly to get out of his throat, but he ruthlessly suppressed them. Crying in the greenhouse where no one could see was one thing, but going to pieces in from of his only friend over something that was his fault to begin with was another. So what if his voice sounded a little dead? The important thing was that he was a Stark, and Starks men don’t cry. 

“Oh jeez,” Rhodey said. He flipped his book shut and turned his chair all the way around so he was facing the camera flowers. “Can you fix it?”

“Not right away. It’s delicate work, too delicate for the other bots to do. I’d have to do it myself, but I’d have to get out of the house to do it.”

“That sucks, man.”

Tony winced. Yeah, an engineer who hurt their robots definitely sucked. 

“I know. There’s nothing I can do without jeopardizing the whole project, though.” Selfish, selfish, selfish. Surely his sweet little bots mattered more than his freedom. If he wasn’t such a miserable, weak excuse for a Stark he’d understand that and gladly take whatever punishment Howard dished out for escaping if it meant he could go and make things better. 

“Are you okay, Tones? You sound kind of off.”

Why couldn’t he even speak right? He wasn’t supposed to get upset, the only time Starks got upset was when they were angry at other people’s mistakes. That wasn’t the case now, there was no one to blame but himself. And what was with Rhodey, sounding  _ concerned _ about him? No one should be concerned for Tony, he was the one that caused this whole mess.

“I’m fine, you know me. I can engineer my way out of anything. It’s not too big of a loss, I can always make a new one. Clearly this one wasn’t good enough for the job.”

Those assurances probably would have worked better if they were delivered with something other than a grim monotone. 

“That bad, huh? I’m sorry Tones, that’s rough. Is there any way for me to help?”

“What?”

Why would he offer to help? Wasn’t this the part where he listen out all the imperfections and personal flaws he’d noticed since meeting Tony and how those flaws led to this disaster? He probably wouldn’t be as thorough as Howard, since he hadn’t had a good chance to practice yet, but he certainly shouldn’t be offering to help. Tony didn’t  _ deserve _ help.

“Do you need some help? I don’t know where your secret project is,” he rolled his eyes at the camera when he said ‘secret project,’ like it was a fun little diversion and not a serious bid for escape, “but if it’s nearby I might be able to get there. My mom might even thank you for getting me out of the dorm. She’s always on my case about spending too much time cooped up studying. Of course, she also gets on my case about  _ not _ studying, so it might be a moot point.”

Refusal perched on the tip of his tongue. He should set Rhodey straight, make sure he knew what a failure he was and how little he deserved his help. But the thought of his bot sitting in the middle of the construction site, broken and alone and betrayed by its creator, stayed his words. He didn’t deserve help, but his bots did. 

“You would do that, Platypus?” He needed to work on his personal presentation, the hope in his voice sounded pathetic even to  _ him. _ A solid decade hidden away from the press had seriously damaged his skills. 

Rhodey shrugged at the camera, like his offer was no big deal. 

“Sure. Semester’s not even that far along yet, I won’t be  _ for real _ busy for another couple of weeks.”

Tony pictured his precious bot, getting patched back together by Rhodey’s steady, reliable hands. Rhodey might be dumb enough to think being his friend was a good idea, but he was still light years away from Tony’s own perpetual state of screw-up-dom. When he pictured those hands that so often playfully swiped at the camera flowers or carefully smoothed out papers so Tony could get a good look at them through the vine bot, now turned on the broken willow tree, he felt some of the painful horror in his chest begin to drain away. 

His bots would be in good hands. 

“If you hang on a sec, I’ll email you the location. It’s super secret, of course, so secret I don’t always allow even myself to know where it is.”

Rhodey tried to hold back a chuckle, but Tony knew his tells by now. He might manage not to make a sound, but the back of his jaw always moved like it was struggling to open wide enough to let out a laugh without the help of the rest of his face. 

“Don’t laugh, Platypus, I mean it. It’s so secret I couldn’t even hire workers. Had to make them all from scratch by myself.”

“Alright, I hear you. So, where is this incredibly secret location? Are you going to make another robot just to come blindfold me and carry me there by the most confusing and hard to remember path possible?”

Well, Tony had been planning on just sending him a map and some instructions, but that clearly wasn’t as good a plan as Rhodey had just come up with.

“Got it in one, honey, this is why they let you into the smarty pants school. What time can you make your way down to East Oakfield?”

“The bus leaves in like ten minutes, so maybe give me an hour?”

“A whole hour? I’m going to have to rethink this whole ‘going places’ thing, it seems to take up an absurd amount of time,” he teased. 

“Well excuse me for inhabiting a physical body that I can’t just beam to another location over the internet,” Rhodey laughed. “Not all of us can have an army of robot minions.”

“Okay, okay, once you’re there, wait by the Campbell Nature Reserve, I’ll send someone to come pick you up.”

“Roger that. Now don’t keep me waiting!” He brandished a finger at the camera screen. “If I’m getting escorted by a mysterious man’s mysterious robot, I better be getting the full gothic-style sci-fi evil-scientist-in-an-old-castle treatment, you hear?”

“If you  _ insist, _ ” Tony fake-pouted. “See you in an hour.”

Rhodey nodded decisively at the camera, then stood up and grabbed a mostly-empty backpack lying at an angle against his bed as he swept out of the room. 

After a few seconds, Tony disengaged the camera and ordered the robot back under Rhodey’s bed. He had preparations to make. 

* * *

He sent one of the strongest oak tree robots he had to pick his friend up. It was one of the first big robots he’d ever made, and one of the sturdiest.

Once he located his friend, loitering just off the road at the edge of the Reserve and doing an excellent impression of someone with no particular place to be, he ordered the robot to still. Rhodey had said he wanted the full evil-scientist treatment. It was really the least he could do to comply. 

On silent, careful roots like multitudinous, wriggling centipede legs Tony piloted the robot closer and closer, watching Rhodey. Sometimes his eyes strayed into the depths of the forest, but his robot was plant enough to fool the uninitiated. His eyes always slid back to the road, where he covertly stared at any vehicle that came close to the Reserve. Tony giggled to himself. Silly Platypus, turning his back on the forest. 

With one lightning-fast strike, he grabbed Rhodey with one of the lower branches of the oak tree robot and heaved him onto an upper branch near the trunk, like he was swinging a toddler onto his shoulders. 

“Jesus Christ!” Rhodey shouted. He struggled out of the branch’s grip, like he was planning to leap from it’s clutches and run to safety, only to abruptly scramble back against the trunk like a frightened cat when he realized he was a good fifteen feet up. It was about then that his memory visibly caught up with the rest of him and he remembered that Tony’s entire workforce were robotic plants. 

“Is this how you thank me for riding down here to clean up your mess?” He demanded. His voice bubbled with unreleased laughter. Tony smiled even wider. He wished he had a display screen of some sort so Rhodey could see it. For now though, he’d just have to make due with the microphone.

“Come on Rhodey-bear, you said you wanted the full evil scientist treatment!”

“I take it back, that was act one of a horror movie.”

But he laughed while he said it, and it was one of the best sounds Tony had ever heard. 

* * *

It didn’t take too long to bring Rhodey to the Tower, once they were out of sight of the road. The tree robot’s roots flew across the ground, wrapping around boulders and digging into the ground to drag itself forward and then yanking them free just as quickly. Tony kept track of it’s progress from his greenhouse.

Once it reached the Tower proper, Rhodey quickly got down to business. 

Just looking at the busted willow robot through the camera was enough to make him wince. In the time since it had broken down, nature had clearly tried to claim it. It was covered in dust and forest debris. A bird had been at it at some point, and an enterprising squirrel was currently exploring the inner branches. 

“That the robot?” Rhodey asked. 

“Yep. Now, first things first I’m gonna need you to find the grafting switch and flick it on. That’ll put it in the right mode to accept physical additions. Technically it’s always prepared to accept new add-ons, but this way it won’t get all suspicious of its own branches and try and tell you there’s a problem.”

“Where is it?”

“Look under the bottom-most branch, there should be a spot about the size of your thumb that doesn’t quite match up perfectly with the rest of the BARK.”

“This stuff doesn’t look like bark to me,” Rhodey scoffed as he ducked under the branch.

“Sure it is, it’s Bidirectional Auto-modeling Robotic Kinetoform. I designed it myself. That BARK can interface chemically, electrically, and physically with just about any plant and most electronics it comes across, without any outside help from me.”

“So I just push this magic button, and then I can stick a new branch on?” 

“Exactly! Well, not exactly, you’ve also got to tell it that you’re going to graft something to it, but I’ll take care of that on my end.”

“Okay, man,” Rhodey said, a little bit of laughter leaking into his words. “So could i graft anything on, or are you telling it to only accept the branch? Could we graft on, like, a pencil instead?”

Tony paused. It wasn’t like his Tower was on any sort of schedule, and now that Rhodey was there he could breathe easy about his poor little robots. There was no reason they couldn’t play around a bit. And now that Rhodey had brought it up, he was kind of curious. He’d grafted plants onto his robots before, but he’d never tested the graft function on anything that wasn’t organic plant matter or another robot part. 

“Why don’t we find out?”

* * *

It was starting to get dark by the time Tony’s robot carried Rhodey back out of the woods.

It turned out that with a little creativity you  _ could _ graft a pencil onto one of his robot trees, and if they were very careful with the controls, they could get it to write out the answers to Rhodey’s math homework. The handwriting was atrocious, and he would definitely have to re-write it when he got back to his dorm, but that wasn’t the point. 

* * *

The Tower was complete.

Really, it had been complete for at least a month, but it was difficult for Tony to wrap his head around the idea. He kept wasting time setting up more features and rooting more robot plants into the walls and floors. Eventually, though, Rhodey asked about his progress and he realized he’d finished everything important, and a good chunk of the unimportant stuff. All he had left to do was escape.

It could be like an eighteenth birthday present to himself.

That, too, was a strange idea when he was actually confronted with it. While the plan had always been to leave, he somehow had never actually imagined leaving the greenhouse. It had been years since he’d left. His entire world was one large building, whose every nook and cranny he knew intimately and where he could find anything he wanted with his eyes closed. He was giddy with the possibilities that would open to him the second he walked out into the wide, wild world, but only now did he consider that that meant not knowing everything about his surroundings. That that mean getting lost, and leaving things behind, and having to re-establish a sanctuary in the Tower. 

He couldn’t take all of the plants with him. He’d upgraded the robotic ones so that they could move, and discretely snuck some of them to the Tower in drones, but there were some that he was just going to have to say goodbye to. That too was harder than expected. 

And so he stalled. He talked to Rhodey about possible improvements to the Tower. He updated the shielding technology on his drones and ferried larger and larger plants to the Tower. He paced through the maze-like corridors of the greenhouse like he was newly banished and still adjusting to living in a walled-off world. He went over his escape plan again, then again, and then again. 

All up it took him about two weeks to get ready to leave. 

He left on a dark, rainy night, carrying a backpack with all of the personal belongings he hadn’t yet delivered to the Tower by drone. A robot shaped like a daisy chain hung from his wrist, and another one shaped like a spongy ball of moss sat in his left pocket. The former sent and received messages, both human and plant, radio and electrochemical, and the later interfered with any cameras or sensors within a twenty foot radius. 

He walked quickly towards the tree line, trying to put as much distance between himself and the mansion without drawing attention. He trusted the moss in his pocket to hide him from cameras, but his heart pounded hard enough to burst through his ribs at the idea of his father or a maid catching sight of him through the window and raising the alarm. It wasn’t likely- everyone should be asleep by now, and the rain and the dark were sure to obscure him figure- but in his mind the shadows were full of watching eyes. 

Part of it was also the strange and inconvenient way in which his memories from long ago superimposed themselves over his current reality, as though he was coming back to a town he’d vacationed in once and couldn’t help but compare it’s present to its past. The last time he’d been down here, outside the greenhouse, he’d been much younger. 

It was distracting.

He made it to the trees without incident, and just about collapsed into the mud as the adrenaline began to wear off. The rain felt too cold against his fear-hot face, and the woods were a dark and impenetrable expanse before him, and every doubt he’d had was clamoring in his ears, but he pushed it all aside. He was free.

Somewhere around here there should be a robot to pick him up and carry him to the Tower. He’d figured that after so many years spent locked in the greenhouse he’d have trouble getting anywhere fast by foot. When he’d floated the idea by Rhodey, he’d agreed that Tony would probably have a tough time traveling by himself by any conventional means, especially if he wanted to do so without standing out or creating a scene. It wasn’t until he’d caught his breath and started looking around him that he realized he had a problem. 

The robot he was looking for was disguised as a rather unremarkable tree, much like the one he’d used to bring Rhodey to the half-completed Tower to help him fix the broken-down willow tree bot. This had seemed like a perfect idea back in the greenhouse- he’d even tested it out to great success! His bot had easily carried Rhodey all the way to the construction site without incident! However, from the greenhouse he’d been able to remotely send commands to the robot. It hadn’t been necessary for him to  _ find _ it. 

With only the stars, the moon, and the ambient light pollution from the mansion for illumination, the trees were rather difficult to distinguish. 

He fingered the daisy chain around his wrist. He could probably call the robot to him. What was the purpose of having a specialized piece of robot-jewelry if not to solve problems like this? 

It only took one look behind him to remind him why. 

In theory, everyone in the mansion was deeply asleep. In theory, the tree robot would be stealthy enough to get close without causing a ruckus or setting off any alarms. It hadn’t attracted any unwanted attention when he’d sent it to pick up Rhodey, after all. 

And then it hit him, and if he hadn’t still been nervous of making noise he would have slapped his forehead. He wasn’t in the greenhouse anymore. Sure, he’d planned to get picked up at the edge of the forest and be off as soon as possible, but he didn’t  _ have  _ to stop here. He could just keep walking until he was far enough away to call his ride without fear of noise or capture. 

He threw one last glance at the mansion, as though daring it to stop him, then spun on his heel and marched into the forest.

He quickly discovered that walking was kind of slow. Some conditioned part of him kept expecting to get somewhere, but of course that wasn’t going to happen. There was nowhere within a couple hours walking distance to get to. This wasn’t a short corridor, it was a random direction in the forest. 

After about twenty minutes, the sense of wrongness became nearly unbearable, and on top of that his legs had begun to hurt. Once he got to the Tower, his next order of business would have to be finding a way to fly. Or perhaps he’d just never leave the Tower. How could people like hiking, if this was all it was? Walking and walking and never getting anywhere?

He came to an abrupt stop in the first clearing of relatively good size that he came across. This would have to be far enough from the mansion to call the bot. He certainly wasn’t walking any further. 

* * *

The robot arrived promptly once called.

It lowered a branch, scooped Tony up, and deposited him in a large hollow further up the trunk.

Success. 

He immediately kicked up the robot’s speed a little bit. Stealth was important, and the last thing he needed was to get caught, but he needed to get as far away from the mansion as possible. It wasn’t rational, but every time he managed to relax even a little bit, the image of his father waking and finding him gone gripped him. 

He traveled through the night. He kept the stealth shields up to avoid being seen, trusting the solar-panel leaves to make up for it in the morning. For the most part it wasn’t a problem; the robot blended in pretty well with the woods around it. But every once in a while they absolutely had to cross a road, in which case there was nothing to do but wait until the road was clear and cross as quickly as possible. He had no desire to test how well the shield held up without a backdrop of forest to help it along. 

Tony’s pre-planned route neatly avoided urban areas, but that meant taking detours and going way out of his way at a couple of points. Time passed, and eventually he fell into a fitful doze, only to jerk back awake when the robot next reached a road. 

Eventually, though, he made it to the Tower. 

It was difficult to see it at first, and if he hadn’t been able to disable the various deflectors and projections he’d added to keep it hidden, he’d have ridden the tree robot right up to the base and never caught sight of it. The daisy chain around his wrist warmed slightly against his skin as it received countless fake signals, most of which were merely passive projections, and sent the corresponding passwords and code phrases that allowed it access the the other plant robots installed in the Tower. 

When he finally reached it, it was like walking into the setting of one of his dreams. He had planned and built every inch of the Tower, but he had never seen it in person before. It rose like a thick, straight tree trunk towards the sky. It was covered in mosses and grasses, and other plants grew in hollows and faux rotting areas. Brilliant green leaves fluttered against the blue sky, taking in solar energy to help recharge some of the less self-sufficient robots. The whole building breathed and moved like a living ecosystem. 

His greatest creation. 

A branch of the tree robot that had carried him all the way down from Stark Mansion shuddered, then bent inwards. Spindly, bark covered twigs wrapped around the handles of Tony’s luggage like fingers and pulled them out of the hollow where he’d been riding. With slow but smooth movements, the branch arched back out and away from the trunk and offered the bags to him.

“Why thank you!” He accepted the bags with a satisfied smile, then patted the tree lightly and sent it to join the other tree robots standing around the Tower. 

Bags in hand, he walked towards the Tower entrance. There was a large, thin hollow, like part of the base of the “tree” had rotted away, and once he ducked inside it he pushed aside the moss curtain that obscured the way in. Once inside, an elevator whisked him to the top, which spread out and away from the main base of the trunk into what appeared from the outside to be a dense, impenetrable mass of branches and leaves. In truth, the inside of that mass was hollowed out and fitted with a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a sitting area. Much of it was formed from the “wood” of the tree itself, making it blend in with the rest of the space. 

He set his bags down and collapsed onto a soft patch the size of a pallet covered in soft ground cover, mosses, and grasses. It sagged slightly underneath him as his weight compressed the soft plant matter. 

He was free, and he was exhausted. 

* * *

It didn’t take long to settle into life in the Tower. He video chatted with Rhodey much more often, and spent the rest of his time building, experimenting, and modifying. For once he was in complete control of his environment, and it was fantastic. It was like he’d carved out a little corner of the world that he could shape and bend and grow as he willed.

Rhodey, being the party pooper that he always was, didn’t quite see it that way.

“So, just to recap: you escaped from your weird home life where your dad made you stay in the greenhouse all the time like some sort of prisoner. Excellent, so far so good. Then you go to a hideaway you’ve been building for the past couple of years specifically as a place to run away to. Perfect, great plan. Now, you’re free, you can mix engineering and botany to your heart’s content and you don’t have to live under your dad’s thumb.”

“I’m not sure I like that tone of voice honey-bear, it almost sounds like you’re leading up to something bad, and from where I’m standing there’s nothing bad about any of this. I built my own paradise.”

Rhodey rolled his eyes and flicked the flower containing the camera on the ambulatory vine that Tony had dubbed the ‘Rhodey phone’ and made a permanent fixture of Rhodey’s dorm. The flower popped and swayed like a ship on heavy seas for several seconds before settling. 

“ _ Then,  _ once you’ve obtained all that freedom, you do what with it?”

“Uh, hello, were you listening to anything I said for the past ten minutes? I build cool plant robots, like the one that’s going to show up for you tomorrow, so don’t be alarmed. And also maybe get rid of anything flammable before it gets there.”

Rhodey was not distracted. 

“Tony, I know you don’t see it this way, but from my perspective it looks like you just built your own greenhouse.”

“Well, where else would I put the plants that can’t deal with the pressures of winter?”

“That’s not what I meant, Tones. I meant a greenhouse like the one you just left. Tell me, does this scenario sound familiar? You live in a small, clearly delineated space, isolated from other people. Inside that small space, you live, build robots, do the whole mad scientist thing, and you call me and we have a ball making stupid engineering jokes. You never see anyone but me, and occasionally the delivery people that bring your materials to a dummy location. You don’t see either of us in person. You’ve built up a lab that can synthesize most of what you need, and you buy the rest with money you got using algorithms that predict what’s going to happen next in the stock market. Am I describing your greenhouse back at that fancy-pants house of yours, or the Tower you live in now?”

Well, when he put it that way, it sounded like Tony was trying to replace his father with himself, or something crazy like that.

“Platypus, I know you think I can just go out and meet people, but I promise you, my dad is looking for me, and galavanting around town, socializing and getting my face picked up by cameras is practically begging for him to come get me.”

Rhodey sighed. 

“I know, Tony. I know. I’m just so frustrated that so much is still the same.”

“But it’s really not. Look,” he swung the camera out so Rhodey could see all the engineering detritus he’d left strewn across the Tower floor. “I could never have done so much open engineering before, not when I might have gotten caught and made dad all paranoid.”

“Can I come see you, Tones?” Rhodey asked suddenly, cutting off whatever Tony was going to say next. He didn’t mind, though. Just hearing Rhodey’s words sent surges of pleasure through his blood. Rhodey, in the flesh? Where Tony could touch him and hug him and really  _ see _ him?

“Yes, definitely, come! My Rhodey-bear is always welcome. Mi torre es su torre and all that. When’s the soonest you can come?”

“How about this weekend?”

“Done, written on the calendar in pen, I’ll see you Saturday. I’ll send a robot to pick you up, same spot as last time.”

“See you, Tones.”

* * *

In the days leading up to Rhodey’s visit, Tony started spending more time outside the Tower. He didn’t leave the general area, of course, and he  _ knew _ that Rhodey wasn’t going to be there until Saturday, but he couldn’t stand the thought of missing even a moment of flesh-and-blood Rhodey by waiting up in the Tower instead of meeting him at the edge of the clearing.

However, being out in the open made him vaguely anxious. It wasn’t nearly so bad as that first moment, when it had really sunk in that he was out in the wall-less world and he could just keep on walking forever, but it still made the back of his neck itch. There was just so  _ much  _ in every direction.

So when he heard the soft thud of a shoe sole colliding with a rock, he was instantly on guard. Adrenaline raced through his system, bringing with it a flurry of half-formed, panicked thoughts. Had someone already found this place? How? He’d thought it was safe, that the robots that hung like long, swaying grasses from the Tower were capable to deflecting and fooling any cameras or scanners on the market, but what if he’d missed something? 

And then Rhodey emerged from behind the willow tree he’d fixed for Tony, smiling wide and arms open. 

Every tense muscle in his body relaxed. He was safe, and his Platypus was here. 

“Rhodey! How did you get all the way out here all by yourself? Did one of my bots give you a lift without telling me? Are my children starting to plot behind my back?”

“I’m glad you made it, Tones,” Rhodey laughed as he crossed the space between them and pulled him into a hug. Tony let himself sink into the warm, safe feeling of it. It was strange, in a way, to be hugged after spending so much time isolated in the greenhouse, without regular physical contact with other people. His skin prickled and pulsed under Rhodey’s touch, trying to tell his brain that someone was grabbing him and he should prepare to either weather it out or escape, but that urge to recoil was buried under the pleasure of touch. He felt like he would overheat if he staying another second in his arms, but would surely start shivering if he pulled back. 

It was all very different from seeing him through a screen. 

At last Rhodey pulled back, sparing Tony the need to do it himself. But he kept his hand on Tony’s shoulder. It wasn’t as nice as the hug, but it didn’t consume his entire mind to the point of distraction either. 

“Of course I made it,” he said with a grin. “I’m a genius with a robot army.”

Rhodey chuckled. 

“Yep, that you are. But are you a genius with a robot army who knows how to get to the top of this tree, because there are no branches on this thing for like fifty feet, man, how are we supposed to get to the top?”

“Rhodey-bear, honey, did you think I didn’t include an elevator in the plans?”

“Well I don’t know what you planned to include, every looked like a weird plant.”

“Well this weird plant comes with an elevator. Here, once you’re inside it’s easy to see, but you can’t get in without my help. Nothing against you, Platypus, but I feel better with the extra security.”

* * *

James didn’t quite know what to expect from Tony’s Tower. When he’d come to help fix the construction robot, it had looked like a very strange, put-together-wrong tree with wires occasionally sticking out. Now that it was finished, he wasn’t sure he could honestly say it looked any better. But then again, Tony seemed to really be comfortable with basing his designs on plants, so who knows. Maybe this was the easiest thing for him to conceptualize.

Whatever he was expecting, however, the sight that greeted him when he stepped out of the elevator blew those expectations right out of the water. 

The whole room was bursting with rhododendrons. Delicate flowers hung like flared skirts of invisible dancers from a hundred bushes that crowded out the furniture and completely hid the floor from view. The smell of rhododendrons hung like thick, sense-muffling perfume. The startling constellations of color against the darker green leaves of the bush were so shocking to his eyes that it took him a few seconds to realize that some of the flowers were moving on their own. Some of them might have been glowing a little. 

“Tony, are these robots?”

“They’re rhododendron robots!” Tony corrected emphatically. “I had a bunch of time on my hands, being the good-for-nothing runaway layabout that I am, and I thought hey! I know what I should do. I should make some rhodies for Rhodey.”

Tony’s eyes were positively sparkling, and James couldn’t keep the growing grin off his face if he tried. He felt weightless, like hot, buoyant laughter was inflating his chest like a hot air balloon. 

“Thank you, Tony. They’re beautiful.”

“I heard people give each other flowers for important occasions, right, and you going away for a couple of years is a big event, right? But then I thought for sure that other people would be giving you flowers, because duh, lots of people are going to miss you, but I wanted to give you something special, so I built these for you,” Tony rambled. He looked uncomfortable, but not in a bad way. 

James had gotten very used to that look very quickly over the past couple of weeks. It hadn’t really sunk in yet, that he was going half a world away to fight, and he wasn’t coming back for a long time. 

“So anyway, you obviously can’t take the whole plant with you, since they’re so big, but you can take some of the petals, and they won’t break or decay or anything, but they  _ will _ go flat or pinch or fold like normal flowers. And if you ever need help getting in contact with someone really quickly, just say ‘Handsome Engineer here, can I get a line?’ and it’ll-”

“I’m sorry Tony, you want me to say what?”

“Don’t like the password? That’s unfortunate, it’s a really complicated process to change it, so you’re kinda stuck with it.” Tony’s grin wasn’t even the tiniest bit ashamed. “Gotta make sure it’s something you wouldn’t normally say, after all. Wouldn’t want to accidentally turn them on.”

He was really going to miss this little cretin. 

* * *

Obadiah Stane wandered slowly through the halls of Stark Mansion, trying to think of where the Stark heir could be hiding. The plush carpeting muffled his footsteps until they were as silent as if he’d been walking on thick snow. It added to the suffocating silence that had fallen over the building like a curse. The only sound was his own breathing, which no matter how he tried he couldn’t quiet enough to not hear, and occasionally his heart beat.

In the wake of Howard and Maria Stark’s deaths, people began to ask after their son. At first the lies and cover stories had seemed like they might hold long enough for him to uncover the truth, but no matter how much time he tried to buy, it wasn’t enough. 

As the days passed from one frantic-yet-solemn press conference to another, a nervousness had begun to take root in his gut. Howard had been a little erratic at the end, for all that no one would ever say as much to the cameras. The drinking and paranoia had worsened, and the trips to the arctic had increased. Obadiah would not have been unduly surprised if his old business partner had done something  _ unfortunate _ while he was away making good use of that same instability to build illicit business networks in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. 

He might have entertained the idea that Howard’s ghost lingered here, were it not for the meticulous cleanliness and order. Howard had had everything cleaned the night before he left. If something of Howard was still here, there would have been overturned furniture and messages written on mirrors and any number of other horror movie cliches. With these words he quieted the occasional shudder that slid down his spine. Howard would never know the part he had played in his untimely demise, or his plans for the genius son. No one watched him here, and guilt was for weaker men than him. 

Howard would have understood that much, at least.

He couldn’t hear the birds or insects outside through the thick walls of the mansion, and it was a still, windless day. The silence should not bother him, it should help him  _ think. _

The Stark heir was not at boarding school. He was not receiving special tutoring. He wasn’t with any old friends of the family. That was supposed to be a good thing- let Howard isolate the kid, then swoop in every once in a while to boost his self-esteem, get the brat eating out of his hand. 

But now the press wanted to know where Tony Stark was, and they were going to discover the lie before long. 

And Obadiah couldn’t find the boy genius  _ anywhere. _

He needed a way to spin this, one that didn’t tear down Howard’s legacy or cast doubt on the company or its leadership. Kidnapping? That ship had sailed. Anyone who would have actually believed that someone could have gotten to the boy past whatever safeguards Howard had set up would want to know why it was only being reported now. He could claim the child had died suddenly of grief or something sentimental like that, but then there was always the risk that the boy would show up again and blow that story to pieces. 

He paced through the empty halls of Stark Mansion and wished he could hear his own footsteps. He found himself staining his ears for them. 

He’d argued with Howard about the boy. So what if he was smarter than Howard? There was more than one way to be smart, and the kid couldn’t be good at everything. He’d tried to find a polite way to ask his partner how low he’d fallen to be envious of and threatened by an elementary schooler, but Howard must have heard his contempt. He always tried to explain that the kid was dangerous or uppity or some other silly thing, and refused to listen when Obadiah explained how that was a good thing for the company. Surely Howard wanted someone to carry on his legacy at Stark Industries? Someone with the mind to innovate, to improve, to keep the family name on top? 

Oh well. Howard was gone now, and the kid was in the wind. But no one disappeared without a trace. All he had to do was look close enough to find the brat’s trail. 

He would have to change his strategy. Up until now he’d been looking for the kid or clues to his location. Now, he would have to widen his net to include anything and anything connected with the kid. 

The greenhouse was the obvious place to start. There had been no sign of a break-in or -out, and Tony himself clearly wasn’t there, so it had been scratched off the list of possible locations and forgotten. 

Now, as he stepped through the door and into the hot, humid building, he was on the lookout for something else. Schematics, wires, notebooks, anything the kid might have left behind. 

It took him a while, but eventually he found what he was looking for; a piece of paper ripped out of a notebook, covered in cramped writing and unintelligible schematic designs. Well, unintelligible to him. What good were all those scientists he was paying at SI if they couldn’t puzzle some of this out?

* * *

The message arrived about a month after Rhodey left for Afghanistan.

It had sent Tony’s heart into his throat when he first saw it. How had it gotten here? Rhodey was the only one who knew where the Tower was, and he wouldn’t have contacted him this way, with a drone carrying a paper letter. But who could it be? Had Howard found him after all?

He was outside the Tower when it arrived, and for a second he considered fleeing into the Tower. Almost immediately he decided against it. The drone hovered in place without attacking. Whatever message it might carry, whoever may have sent it, the drone itself wasn’t dangerous. At least, not yet. 

With shaking hands he took the letter.

_ Tony- _

_ I hope this finds you well. We’ve been looking all over for you, but you seem to have well and truly disappeared. Had you been here, I could have delivered this news to you in person, properly. But it also wouldn’t be right to keep it from you, so I’ll tell you here.  _

_ You parents were killed in a car crash. The autopsy suggested that Howard might have had a little too much to drink. You remember how he could get sometimes.  _

_ I don’t know why you left, but if you wish to return, you’ll meet with a warm welcome. Your old man left a big hole in the company that I bet you could fill perfectly. Howard didn’t give me many opportunities to see your designs, but everything I saw was genius. That spiraling detachment schematic you showed me? The one we took to show your dad? That thing revolutionized the weapons industry, and helped SI edge out the competition on some key contracts. You didn’t leave much behind, but some of my guys at SI were able to use some notes you left to build some great scanning devices. I won’t pretend I understand it, but it’s how they were able to send this drone to you. Or at least, where we think you are. They said that if you had drawn up those notes, then you were probably wherever these waves were originating from in unusual quantities. Like I said, I’m just the businessman, so this is all a little fuzzy for me. But even I can see the potential applications.  _

_ Come home, Tony. Whatever problems you might have had with your father, you should at least come to the memorial. Let me help you out.  _

_ Obie _

His first thought was  _ At least Howard didn’t find me. Better Obie than Howard. _

His second thought wasn’t so much a thought as it was a tangled, confused ball of feelings. His parents were dead. He was free at last from any possibility of them finding him. He was an orphan. His father would never scream or drink or be disappointed in him ever again. His father would never be proud of him, or want to see him. He realized he hadn’t said more than two consecutive sentences to his mother in five years. 

The drone, now that it’s cargo was safely delivered, rose up and flew away. Tony barely noticed. Shaken, he returned to the Tower. He needed to talk to Rhodey. 

* * *

When he’d left, he’d told Rhodey to keep in contact, to which Rhodey had replied that as long as he belonged to the military, they could control his communications. He might not be able to call for long periods of time if something came up, and he might not be able to talk freely.

That was absolutely unacceptable, so of course Tony had taken precautions. Rhodey’s luggage when he left had been filled with tiny desert plants, tucked away in his socks and between his clothes. If he needed to talk to Rhodey and Rhodey’s new bosses weren’t being obliging, he could just pilot one of his robots with a camera and a speaker and go find his Platypus that way. 

So when Rhodey didn’t pick up, at first Tony wasn’t unduly worried. That just meant he had to use his backup plan. 

He sent out a quick burst of signals to his robots to determine where they were (they had been programmed to disburse once Rhodey reached his assignment to avoid suspicion) and how close they were to Rhodey. He selected a cactus hiding in the sand and switched on its cameras. It was following Rhodey from a discrete distance, so he’d have to pilot it over to him, but it should be close enough that finding his Rhodey-bear wouldn’t be a problem. 

Then he turned on the camera and his illusions were shattered. 

The scene on screen was one of confusion and chaos and violence. Guns boomed and sand flew in every direction. The camera was low to the ground, so the action seemed to tower over him, high above his reach. People and vehicles were moving and people kept screaming and Rhodey was somewhere in that mess but he couldn’t find him.

He searched the screen frantically, but it was no use. There were too many people moving too fast and in too many different directions, the camera angle was horrible, and the shocking sound of gunfire dashed any hope of picking out Rhodey’s voice amid the hubbub. It was all he could do to separate Rhodey’s side, with their US military uniforms, from the other side. 

He did, however, spot something that made his heart skip a beat. 

The men fighting Rhodey’s group of soldiers had scary, effective-looking guns. Almost the exact same ones as Rhodey’s soldiers were carrying, in face. And blazoned across the sides were a set of familiar words. 

_ Stark Industries. _

But that couldn’t be right. Why would his dad and Obie- well, just Obie now- be selling to these guys?

He put the thought aside for a moment. He would come back to it later, but for now he had to find Rhodey and make sure he made it out of this alive. 

He took a deep breath, straightened his spine, and sent his robot into the fray. 

And then suddenly it was all over. 

Tony blinked. He hadn’t seen what happened, but something must have happened because the people without uniforms suddenly withdrew, and the sounds of gunfire faded away to a dull echo in his ears. Soldiers wearing Rhodey’s uniform began to move in a more organized flow, now with a much less frantic edge. 

The change made Tony’s head spin. 

Finally he caught sight of his Platypus. Unfortunately, he found him deep in conversation with several other men in uniform. There was no chance of safely getting his attention. 

It was enough to make him want to throw something. Undirected energy sizzled up and down his veins, urging him to do something. Fear, horror, and shock from the battle mixed with the ball of emotions from his parent’s death announcement that he had called Rhodey to address in the first place. He had to do something, or he would curl up and start crying. 

Stark Industries. Obie’s company. He could focus on that. Obie wanted him to come back and work for the company. The same company whose logo appeared on the weapons of terrorists in Afghanistan. That was a safe puzzle, one that wouldn’t send him toppling over the edge into an emotional abyss. He had no emotional investment in the company- he’d never even met anyone besides his father and Obie who worked there. And he needed to do something, if only to appease the panicked, primitive part of his brain that didn’t understand that he wasn’t in danger, either from the drone that had so suddenly appeared or from terrorists on his screen.

He launched a couple of search algorithms on his computer and started to research Stark Industries. 

* * *

Tony’s heart hammered in his chest.

He didn’t want it to be true. This was Obie, one of the very few adults who had actually cared about him. Not even his own father had shown as much encouragement and investment as Obie had. 

But there it was. Stark Industries sold under the table to terrorists. 

Stark Industries was dealing to the people trying to kill Rhodey, and Obie was a monster. 

It was all right there on Obie’s “secure” files. His deal with a group called HYDRA to kill Howard. The weapons deals with groups no more savory than HYDRA, who Tony had investigated until he was sure he would throw up if he read even one more word. On that same drive he found bits and piece of schematics he’d shown to Obie over the years, now incorporated into instruments of torture and death. 

Worse still were his plans for Tony. There were notes on how to persuade him to do things in the future, and on how to persuade him. Mock-up documents from lawyers to lock Tony out of key assets, to keep him from gaining control of the company, to declare him mentally incapable, to designate Obie his legal guardian. Medicines and drugs that might induce compliance, or at the very least shatter any resistance. 

If felt like he hadn’t had a single clear thought, untwisted by panic and disgust and grief, since hearing from Obie. Every time he tried to make sense of the past few hours, his thoughts shattered into sharp, painful pieces that slipped through his fingers and left him bleeding and bereft. 

Only two short, simple thoughts managed to stick in his mind. 

One: He needed to protect Rhodey. 

Two: He could not, under any circumstances, return to SI and fall under Obie’s influence. 


	3. Chapter 3

“Intruder Approaching.”

Tony looked up from the piece of wiring he’d been working on and glanced at the row of screens in front of him. One of them flashed red, and a white oval hovered an adult-sized figure traipsing through the forest not far from the Tower.

This man did not look like the hikers or bird watchers that occasionally wandered through the area, looking for a patch of un-urbanized land on which to enjoy nature. He didn’t look like a hunter, either, or any of the few people who lived within striking distance of the forest. He was totally alien to the forest and he moved like it, crashing through bushes and trying to go straight rather than maneuvering around obstacles that cropped up in his path. The robot connected to the screen was shaped like ivy, and was currently too high up a tree to get a good view of the man’s face, so the only clue to the man’s identity was his shiny bald head and his heavy stride.

Tony felt a chemical cocktail of panic start to filter into his bloodstream.

Soon the man began to show up on other screens as other robots picked up on his presence, until he was faced with a wall of flashing read screens and white ovals moving in a thousand different directions based on the position of the camera.

The first few robots got difficult camera angles or didn’t have great lighting, but on the fifth one the man’s face was finally revealed.

Obie was here.

He had found Tony. Somehow he’d found him.

Tony’s breath began to come in short, burning gasps. He couldn’t go home. He wouldn’t go home. He would bind himself to the Tower if he had to, but there was no way Stane was taking him back to Stark Mansion.

Could he fight him off? Send one of his robots down there and just crush him between the strong boughs of one of his trees? For a wild instant, he thought he could. But then he remembered how Obie towered over him, how strong his hands were on Tony’s back as he pushed him this way and that and made it look like intimacy.

_Not anymore_ , he thought desperately, _you’ve grown, you’re not small enough to fit under his thumb anymore, just do it!_

It didn’t matter. His mind shied away from his blood-stained imaginings. Of course he couldn’t kill Obie. Obie wasn’t like him- he had a public life. If he went missing, other people would come looking for him. People would go looking for him, and once they found him they’d swarm on the site of his death like flies to a carcass.

And, if he was being honest with himself, he didn’t really want to kill Obie. When all was said and done, at least he had been better than Howard.

But he also couldn’t let any of his robots fall into Obie’s hands. If he did, Obie would weaponize them in a heartbeat, strip them of their fun and personality and ship them off to the highest bidder. Rhodey’s face flashed through his thoughts. Could Tony live with himself if one of his creations killed Rhodey?

He needed to be able to access his robots, but he also needed to make sure Obie couldn’t take _him_ instead.

On the wall of screens, Obie trampled closer and closer.

Tony glanced frantically around the Tower. There had to be something here, something he could do. He was in his own Tower for heaven’s sake, how could he be helpless in a sentient building of his own design, surrounded by his own creations?

Then his eyes fell on his pallet, and he got an idea.

It could work. It would be risky, and there was a good chance he wouldn’t escape unscathed, but it could work.

He rushed to fridge where he stored chemical compounds that couldn’t be left sitting out on the counter. There, tucked into the corner and labeled in slightly shaky sharpie, sat the new and improved _Extremis._

Grabbing a syringe, he said a quick apology to Rhodey, then filled it up with crackling red fluid and plunged the needle into his arm.

Extremis burned as it entered his system, burned like a forest fire that rose up and up and up through the trees until it was too big and hot and powerful to fight, to powerful to do anything but try and contain it. His vision swam as he threw the needle and the container back into the fridge and pulled a curtain of thick, trailing moss over it to hide it from view. Then he staggered to the center of the room where his pallet rested, and sank into the soft, synthetic ground cover. He closed his eyes and pictured his body as one with the Tower. He pictured his nerves growing out like roots and tangling with the tissue of the tree. He pictured the wood of the tree growing up around his flesh, slowly encasing him. He pictured long, trailing grasses growing out of his chest, covering him from view.

Slowly, the fiery heat of Extremis consumed him.

* * *

The device in Obadiah’s hands hummed louder and louder until the vibrations of it nearly shook his hand as he stepped out of the blasted forest and into a large clearing dominated by a thick, towering tree.

He didn’t understand the signal Tony was using to cloak himself, and none of the scientists on Stark Industries payroll had been able to explain it. But that didn’t matter. Once he got his hands on Tony, he wouldn’t need to know how any of it worked. The boy was weak, and isolated. He wouldn’t be able to stop Obadiah from dragging him back to the company, and even if he did try and fight, he had no allies, no contacts, no one to vouch for him, nothing. So few people had even met the kid that it was almost too easy to meld the Stark heir’s public image to his benefit. He could get him labeled mentally incompetent, or unstable, or any number of other things.

All he had to do was find him. And he knew just where to look.

The only question was how to get to the top of the tree? The little tree hugger probably had an easy way of doing it, but Obadiah couldn’t see any obvious tech laying around the clearing. Just plants, plants, and more plants.

He could bring workmen down here, of course, have them bring a forklift or something to lift him to the thick tangle of branches at the top. But the more people he involved, the more people knew that Tony had run away, and that Obadiah was dragging him back. Not to mention a bigger audience for the kid to put on a performance for. No, it would be better if he could exhaust other options first.

“Tony my boy!” he called out. His voice echoed loudly through the clearing, reverberating slightly off the trees. If Tony was anywhere nearby, he was sure to have heard it.

His call went unanswered.

“It’s me, Tony, your old pal Obie. Now I know you must have taken your parents’ deaths hard. Losing people is hard for everyone. But you’ve got to come home, Tony. Why don’t you come on out so we can talk?”

Nothing.

Well, if the kid wasn’t going to come to him, then he was going to have to go to send something to the kid.

He slung a small backpack of his shoulder and set it on the ground. With quick, definitely-not-frustrated movements he unzipped it, placed the device his scientists had rigged up to track the Stark heir, and pulled out a small device about the size of a water bottle. He gave a button on one side a press, and the top popped off, revealing a spiral of small, oval-shaped drones, each about the size of his thumb. The core began to spin, bringing each one to the open end in turn, where they detached and flew out of the tube, then hovered in place.

When the tube was empty, he activated a small light, and aimed it at the top of the tree.

In response, the drones rose to the top of the tree and out of sight.

* * *

It was hot, and there were so many signals attacking his brain at once. Tony had always dreamed of direct uplinks to the net, of computers in his brain, but this was almost too much. Signals cascaded over each other, all trying to simultaneously reach him. Electrical signals from his own brain crackled up and down his body, and if felt like he was being fried alive.

From somewhere far away, he thought he heard Obie’s voice. He was supposed to stay away from that, wasn’t he? Because Obie was connected to bad people. He sold weapons to terrorists. He sold weapons to the people trying to kill Rhodey.

The Tower. If he could just bind himself to the Tower, then he would be safe. He could send robots to save Rhodey, and Obie wouldn’t be able to drag him away and make him build instruments of death for the rest of his life.

He sank deeper into the heat and prepared to be remade.

* * *

Obie pulled out his tablet and opened the video feed from the little drones he’d sent up. Time to see where the brat was hiding. If Tony kept this bullshit up, he was going to chain him to the lab bench when he finally got his hands on him.

Sure enough, the drone’s videos revealed a little lair hidden up in the near impenetrable branches. It was a simple living space, not even the size of the greenhouse the boy used to live in. Strange plants littered the floor, and curtains of cascading, closely-grown plants covered the walls and ceiling in patches. Here a patch of ivy obscured the ceiling, there a cleanup of hanging moss, and over there thickly grown kinnikinnick. Rhododendrons covered every inch of spare space, turning the room into a confusing cacophony of color that was difficult for the drones to navigate.

And in the center lay Tony, half-enveloped by the tree as though he had lain there sleeping for centuries and the tree itself had grown around him. Before his eyes, the tree grew and grew until Tony’s body was firmly lodged in place, and nothing but a hacksaw could free him. Long strands of grass pushed out of his chest and limbs, each one seeming almost to burn in reverse- the expanding ends shone like embers, and the edges looked almost charred. Little sparks flew, winking out of existence before anything could catch fire. Tony’s skin glowed from within, as though lava rather than blood ran through his veins.

Then, for the grand finale, a bright blue rhododendron grew out straight up out of Tony’s chest.

* * *

Tony’s eyelids twitched, but wouldn’t open.

He felt hot, but he wasn’t burning anymore. The cascade of signals had fallen away in the face of newly constructed mental shields, and his nerves sang with sensation from the entirety of the Tower. He could no longer feel where his flesh ended and plant began.

His eyes felt sluggish and heavy, and for some reason he couldn’t seem to get them to open. Exasperated, he reached out with Extremis for the Tower’s cameras in place of his eyes.

It took a second for the picture to focus. When it did, he nearly panicked.

There was a drone hovering over his face.

He tried to move his arms, only to find them pinned in place by the edges of the tree that had grown up around him, just as he’d planned. They did an excellent job holding him in place- Obie wouldn’t be able to pry him out of this custom-made crevice without a fight. However, he had unfortunately overlooked the fact that growing the tree around him like this would trap his arms along with the rest of his body.

He was _not_ panicking.

“Tony! There you are!” Obie’s voice thundered.

He jumped. Now that Extremis was connecting him to the Tower, he heard Obie’s voice loud and clear, as if through one of the microphones outside the Tower.

“I must say, I didn’t expect anything like _this_ when I went looking for you! Tell me, what’s with the glowing?”

He shut his eyes and stayed silent.

“Come on Tony, you can tell your old pal Obie. I was always the one who came to visit you, even when Howard couldn’t be bothered. What’s got you turning away from me now, huh?”

How long would he have to wait before Obie left? _Would_ Obie leave? And if he did, would he come back?

“Don’t make this hard, Tony. I’ve been real patient with you, but I’m nearing the end of my rope. If you won’t come down here, I’ll have to come up to you.”

Extremis fizzled under his skin as he connected to the cameras on the outside of the Tower. Obie was still standing there, holding a small device in his hand. He didn’t look like he had the equipment to take the Tower by force, but then again he didn’t really know what the little drone hovering over him was capable of doing. But if he had to guess, he’d say Obie couldn’t force him out of the Tower as he was.

“I’m sorry you’ve made this choice, Tony,” Obie continued after a moment. Out of the corner of the camera Tony saw several drones like the one he’d awoken to flying back to Obie and dropping into his hand. He quickly checked the Tower’s internal cameras; there was no longer a drone hovering over his face.

“I’ve got some important business to attend to, but I’ll be back soon. You were always meant to take over the company, at least when your father wasn’t busy thinking you were going to show him up. After all, what would Stark Industries be without a Stark genius keeping us in contracts?”

Obie waved at the Tower, then turned and walked back into the forest.

It took a long time for Tony’s heart rate to return to normal. Then, he started experimenting with Extremis’ ability to grow limbs. One at a time, he grew little branches out of his chest and practiced moving them like fingers.

* * *

Late that night, the drones returned.

The whirring of an intruder alert was what initially roused Tony from his sleep. He tried to stand, but found that his body was stuck, and wasn’t responding correctly. The only things he could move were the limbs he’d built with Extremis.

They came through the floor, through the twisted, woved branches and the leafy ceiling. And once they were inside, they started to shoot jets of flame.

Immediately Tony started to panic. Great billowing clouds of smoke began to fill the Tower as moss and moss robots alike burned. Within minutes he couldn’t draw a breath without feeling the burn of Extremis in his chest. Through every camera he could see flames leaping higher and higher, consuming the Tower.

_I’m going to die,_ he thought. _I’m going to burn to death._

He tried again to move, but nothing would respond.

_Obie is going to burn me to death, and I’m going to just lay here and burn because I can’t get up!_

The heat quickly became unbearable. The blistering waves of it cooked his face, and all around him the very Tower seemed to glow, as if it was turning into one enormous coal in a colossal fire.

_He was never going to see Rhodey again._

The flames reached his body, and suddenly everything hurt like fire-hot needles in his skin. He thought he should be screaming, but he couldn’t draw enough air for it, and his throat didn’t want to cooperate enough to make sounds anyways. He was going to die, he was going to die, he was going to die-

_He wanted Rhodey, where was Rhodey-_

And suddenly, as if beaten back by the force of his memory of Rhodey, the flames began to subside. Glowing filled his vision, and he wondered if this meant he was dead.

There was something odd about how the Tower glowed, though. The flames grew hotter and hotter, but the Tower didn’t fall. In fact, it seemed to be _regenerating._

Of course. He’d injected himself with Extremis, then linked his own body to the Tower itself in order to grow parts of it around him. The problem that he hadn’t been able to solve all those years ago- introducing Extremis to one of his robots.

He activated one of the few cameras that still functioned and looked at himself. Before his eyes, Extremis repaired his burnt skin, letting it all sink down into the molten lava of his body, until he was once again unblemished.

He thought he might cry. Instead, he called Rhodey.

* * *

James was alone in his bunk when he felt the rhododendron clipping that he kept under his jacket shake.

“Platypus,” said Tony’s voice from one of the flowers. “Platypus, are you there?”

He rolled over and faced the wall so he wouldn’t be seen talking to the flowers if someone walked in.

“Yeah, I’m here Tones. What’s up? I promise, I’d have called, but we’re not supposed to for the next while. They think there are some real nasty guys holed up out here, and they want to take them down here, rather than in any of the villages where they might take prisoners or use human shields.”

“Rhodey, this is important. Obadiah Stane is selling Stark Industries weapons to terrorists. And he’s doing a bunch of other stuff too, but the guys you’re hunting down? They have Stark weapons.”

He went still.

“What?”

“ He’s dealing to both sides. That way he gets twice the profits, and the war goes on for longer since both sides are drawing from the same supply. If violence continues, so do his profits. He just sold one to the group in your area called ‘Dragon’s Breath.’”

“That’s the bomb we were gonna use to flush them out of hiding,” he said.

“I know. Look, you’ve gotta tell someone. I’ve already tried to send the stuff I hacked, but they just got mad at me for ‘breaking through their firewalls’ and ’withholding personal information.’”

“Tony you idiot, you broke into their servers, didn’t you.” He ran his hand down his face. Only Tony.

“Can you really all it breaking in if I didn’t even realize they’d had any defenses at all until after I’d blown past them? Seriously, those things couldn’t have caught me when I was ten.”

“Okay Tony, what is it that you want me to do?” Whatever it was Tony needed, he’d do. If Tony thought they were in danger, then they probably were. Though how such a smart person could think breaching military security was a good plan to get people to listen him he’d never know.

“Warn people. Tell whoever’s in charge. Don’t die. I’m going to try and find the Dragon’s Breath Obie sold them and disable it.”

“How are you going to disable it from across the ocean?”

“I sent some little robot goodies with you in your luggage when you left. Just small, innocuous ones, so I could have these little chats with you even if some stuck up commander said you couldn’t call home.”

“For the last time, it’s not because they hate fun, it’s for security reasons.”

“Whatever. I’m gonna go look for the bomb, you start talking.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

And then he was alone again. He swung his legs out of bed and hurriedly re-laced his boots. He’d go alert his CO, and then try and offer whatever backup Tony might need. If he managed to explain this nonsense without sounding insane, that is.

* * *

The camera lens was filled with emptiness. There wasn’t a single plant to be seen anywhere- just an endless, rolling expanse of sand and dirt. Mountains rose in the background, hard and bare-looking. Men ran around the screen in plant-colored camo-patterned clothes with large, black weapons strapped across their backs or across their chests or hanging from their hips. Boxy vehicles composed entirely of smooth, unnatural lines and square corners roamed the landscape like trained elephants, dwarfing the unperturbed soldiers.

At least this time it wasn’t the chaos of a skirmish.

Logically he knew that there were plants that grew even in deserts like these. Some of them were near and dear to his heart, had inspired him with their ability to pretend to be stone until water came, then making the most of a brief opportunity. The camera robot he was using was based on just such a plant: a stone plant, a plant that lied so convincingly to the world that everyone who saw it without examining it would think it was a stone. But looking out for the first time over a proper desert was like looking over a hellish, plantless waste.

Rhodey was somewhere back there, in that camp, trying to convince somebody important that a threat was here, lying in wait, and he was worlds away from Tony.

It felt like deep, strong roots were burrowing through his heart, ripping it apart like a chunk of soil. He pushed past the feeling. It would all be worth it when Rhodey was back, safe and sound.

His mind sank deeper into the Extremis programming, putting as much of himself as possible in the robots in Afghanistan and leaving as little as possible in the Tower. The Tower was safe. Rhodey was not. Until one of those things changed, he couldn’t afford to let himself waste any brainpower on distractions. The robot scanned the desert continuously, and each scan was uploaded directly to Tony’s brain. When electrochemical signals of any sort were received, it was Tony who received them. If there was so much as a vibration in the sand and rock that the robot’s roots could pick up on, Tony felt them as though with his own skin.

It didn’t take him too long to worm his way into the communications networks that appeared to him like several layers of bright, glowing spider web stretching across the desert. Some silken strands shot skyward, stretching straight to the States. Others lead to other bases and other units. Some thrummed between two people, or a small group. He visualized himself as a clump of ever-extending roots, pushing its way into the streams of data and sucking in their data.

The urge to seek out Rhodey in the jumbled threads burned strongly, but he pushed it down. He could do that afterwards, when he was coming down from his laser-focus and needed reassurance that his friend was indeed alive and unharmed. For now, he needed to break into as many lines of communication as possible and make use of the computer his brain had become.

Most of it was meaningless, dry reports about things happening in far-off places, or memos about conduct and policy, or supply orders for food and medical supplies, nothing to do with the Ten Rings or fancy weapons. Not what he needed.

Until- there! A message that didn’t originate with the army, or any of the local villages. And whoever was using it was using the words ‘Dragon’s Breath.’

He focused in on the signal. As soon as Extremis locked down on it, the stone plant robot was on the move.

* * *

The Dragon’s Breath bomb was hidden in a shallow cave that overlooked a wide pass where a road cut through the sloping hills. Several men stood around it, holding guns with _Stark Industries_ emblazoned across the sides and snapping at each other in harsh, guttural phrases.

Luckily, they didn’t seem to notice the little stone plant that inched cautiously towards the weapons.

How to go about disabling it? He’d have to do it subtly or very quickly, or the men would realize what was happening try to stop him. But even if there had been, what could he do with a plant that was basically a rock? Perhaps he could hit it really hard and send it toppling into the road below?

Maybe he could get his robot’s roots inside, and disable it that way. He didn’t know what exactly the internal workings were like, but he if he could pull enough wires and break enough components, he might not need to. So long, of course, as the roots didn’t break or get caught somehow. They weren’t as delicate as real roots, but they were still pretty fine structures.

Slowly, like a glacier progressing across the land, he crept the little robot closer and closer to the bomb. He wouldn’t be hurt if one of the men spotted it and tried to shoot, but it would ruin any element of surprise he had on his side. Besides, what if they mentioned a robot disguised as a desert plant to Obie? Or worse, kept the bullet-mangled pieces and tried to build some other instrument of war out of it?

He was lucky, though. Their eyes were all trained outwards, on the open desert and the edges of Rhodey’s camp in the distance. Not a single one was watching the bomb, or looking at the cave floor. In fact, he probably could have moved faster, where it not for his desire to wait to extend the roots out the way he had when leaving the camp until he had reached the bomb itself. Each root stayed close in, almost directly underneath the main body, meaning that each root could only bend enough to take a millimeter long step at best. Once he reached the bomb he would extend them, but for now he had to content himself with the snail’s pace.

At least, he reached it. He let himself have a sigh of relief, then started to cautiously extend the roots. With a little exploring, he found a seam near the bottom. It was very fine, much too fine to stick a root into, but it didn’t quite match up with the lowermost plate, where the bomb proper connected to the launch mechanism. It was just enough of an imperfection to get one of the smaller, hair-like roots inside.

Immediately he began to fish around for something to mess with. There was a tangle of wires that he gleefully pulled out of place, and a thin barrier that he pushed on until it crumpled. The robot’s sensitive ears picked up the light snap of the wires and the crackle of the barrier giving way, but the men in the cave didn’t seem to hear it.

There was no way to know when he’d damaged it enough, so he just kept extending the roots and feeling about for more parts to mess with.

A sudden rumbling came from outside the cave. It sounded like tires on gravel and engines turned on, full speed ahead.

Instantly the men were on high alert, talking now in hushed whispers. They tightened their grip on their guns and began to move into attack positions.

He couldn’t see the road or what they were aiming at, but whatever it was it must have been small enough that they thought they could take it out with their guns.

_Bang! Bang! Bang!_

Several shots went off in quick procession. Then he thought he heard return fire, and then the whole world descended into a cacophony of yelling and gunshots, which were much closer than they should have been. Whatever vehicle had been out on the road that the men had shot at couldn’t possibly be close enough for the return fire to be just as loud as the original shots.

And then abruptly, everything quieted again.

The bomb was in the way, blocking his vision of what was going on in the cave. Who had won? Who had control of the Dragon’s Breath bomb? Who had been hurt?

He pushed those thoughts away and continued destroying the inside of the bomb.

After just a second, however, a message popped up in his brain and pulled him away from his task. Someone was trying to call him.

“Yes?” He answered, engaging the line.

“Tony,” Rhodey said. His words echoed directly into Tony’s brain through Extremis, but they were also coming from somewhere in front of him. “Is your robot in here somewhere? I took out the terrorists guarding the bomb, and I see the bomb in front of me.”

“Oh you don’t know how good that is to hear Honey-bear. I can hear you, I’m in the cave with you. Really surprised me there with that sudden firefight.”

He heard Rhodey start to walk over to where the bomb lay on the cave floor.

“My CO was skeptical when I told him about what you’d told me, so I came out here to find proof. Find some SI guns and spare parts, bring them back to show everyone. But then I found the bomb instead.”

“Excellent, then you can carry these guns and this hopefully disabled bomb back and vindicate yourself.”

The bomb shook, then began to rise. The robot’s camera swung down, showing Rhodey’s dark hands splayed out around the edges of the casing.

“Only need to get it as far as the car. I kind of borrowed some transport without asking. It’s got some bullet holes from getting used as a decoy-” oh, that must have been what he’d heard, the engine of Rhodey’s vehicle getting turned on high once he was out of the car. “But I think once I show them these, they’ll let me off with a warning.”

Mission accomplished. Rhodey was safe, other people knew about Obie, and after a long day of extending his mind around the globe, he could finally get some sleep.

“In that case, I’m out Platypus. Come see me when you get back, okay? I miss you already.”

“Will do, Tones.”

* * *

When Rhodey finally returned to the States, the first thing he did was go pay a visit to the Tower.

Tony had been evasive, after the whole business with Obadiah Stane, about how often he got out of the Tower. Whenever he brought it up, Tony just scoffed and claimed he was having a grant old time experimenting with the limits of Extremis, the experimental concoction he’d apparently injected himself with while Rhodey was away. He claimed there were no negative side effects, and that it worked exactly as planned, and yet they hadn’t had a single video chat since Tony injected himself. tony just called instead, or spoke through one of his speaker-only plant robots.

Tony sent a robot tree to carry him, as usual, but when he reached the clearing where they always met, Tony was nowhere to be seen.

Hesitantly, he headed to the elevator, hoping the Tower would just open for him. Tony claimed that no one could get in without his help, but surely he could buzz a guy in?

“Hey Platypus!” Tony’s voice boomed out at him from the Tower speakers. “Sorry I couldn’t be out there to greet you properly. Just a sec, I’ll send the elevator down.”

Seconds later, the doors parted and the elevator opened. Apprehensively, he stepped inside.

When the doors opened again, they opened on a scene of chaos and destruction. Burn marks scarred the walls, floor and ceilings, and in some places the synthetic “wood” of the tree seemed to have been completely burned away, leaving nothing warped, twisted metal visible. Strange plants that moved in place like fingers burst from the places that weren’t completely destroyed by fire. The wall of cameras had been restored, but all save a few were turned off.

And there lay Tony, in the middle of it all, in a fitted half-coffin that appeared to have formed from the wood of the Tower itself. His eyes were closed, and his skin had gone the sickly pale of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in months. He’d lost some weight, and his hair had grown into a mop. The scraggly, begging-to-be-shaved beginnings of a beard had started to come in. Several strange plants grew out of his body the way they grew out of the rest of the room, and a small rhododendron bush appeared to have taken root in his chest. There was fabric on his body, but he would be hard-pressed to call it clothing. It was too dirty and ripped and burned.

“Jesus, Tony, what happened?”

Tony’s face remained still and impassive, but his voice answered immediately from the speakers.

“Well, you see, I sort of had a little mishap with Extremis. Nothing wrong with it, of course, I was just stupid and in too much of a hurry when I dosed myself.”

“Tony-”

“And I couldn’t let him take me. So I connected to Extremis, because it was supposed to make it so you could grow limbs and stuff, and I figured if I could grow part of myself into the Tower, then I could introduce Extremis to the Tower, and make it grow around me so Obie wouldn’t be able to drag me away kicking and screaming, and so he couldn’t cut the Tower down or anything. And it worked! But also, my arms are pinned and the only things I can move properly are the things I grew with extremis. My face won’t respond beyond going tense or slack, I can’t maneuver very well with my hands, and my legs might as well be made of lead. But! I grew a bunch of “limbs” through the Tower that can bring me food and water and stuff. So it’s fine.”

“Tony-”

“But the weren’t from that! Obie found me, hiked all the way out here to try and bring me back, and when I wouldn’t come he kind of set fire to the Tower. It took it like a champ, too, never lost an ounce of structural integrity. See, Extremis. A good idea.”

_“Tony.”_

The cascade of words stopped.

“If I helped pry you out of there, could you dream up something to get Extremis out of your system?”

“I don’t know.”

Rhodey’s stomach plummeted.

_“But,_ if I couldn’t, then I could still probably make some updates to Extremis’s code that would fix the problem.”

“Good enough for me.”

He picked his way across the floor to Tony and began pulling on the edges of the crevice of wood he’d grown for himself. It gave, just the littlest bit, but it was enough for him to grab Tony’s elbow and yank him free. He heard a cascade of pops and snaps, and then Tony flopped free and slumped in his arms like a rag doll. The rhododendron and other extremis-grown plant “fingers” growing out of his chest poked him in the face, arms, and thighs.

His thin, bony back felt too hot under his hands. When he looked, he saw a wall of reddened skin glowing and turning white again. Seconds later, the skin was unblemished and the heat was fading.

“Oh yeah, that’s better,” Tony said from everywhere at once. “Sorry for going all Sleeping Beauty on you, but I still can’t seem to get my eyes open, so what can you do?”

“It’s fine Tony, let’s just focus on getting you back to normal.”

There was a pause, and then:

“Hey, Platypus, if I’m the princess locked in a Tower in this scenario, and you’re both the dashing young hero come to save me and the brave soldier just come home, it would be out of line for you not to kiss me.”

That little shit had the gall to giggle in surround sound.

“Is that so?” He said. “In that case, I better get to it, huh?”

“Definitely. My lips have gone untouched for too long.”

Carefully, cradling the back of Tony’s head like delicate china, he leaned down and pressed his lips against Tony’s. His lips were chapped and didn’t move much around him, but Tony was very vocal about showing his appreciation through the speakers.

As first kisses went, it was pretty good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hereandnowwearealive on Tumblr was my partner for this bang, and they made fabulous [art!](https://hereandnowwearealive.tumblr.com/post/185416125553/for-jacarandabanyan-s-magical-imbb-fic-iron)


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